


Safe as Houses

by okapi



Category: And Then There Were None (TV 2015), And Then There Were None - Christie, CHRISTIE Agatha - Works
Genre: Anal Fingering, Angst, Angst and Porn, Cunnilingus, F/M, Frottage, Heterosexual Sex (I know I know but there you have it), POV Vera, References to Murder Including Child Murder, Smut, Unhappy Ending, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-25 18:56:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14983454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: Vera Claythorne/Philip Lombard. Angst & Smut. POV Vera.Note: Chapter 3 features canon-compliant major character death.From Agatha Christie'sAnd Then There Were None. Inspired by the 2015 TV film [specifically Aidan Turner's chest!] but more based on the Christie original novel.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have ideas for two more chapters, so if you like this, please let me know.

Vera Claythorne was empty.

She was always empty when she thought of Hugo and then forced herself _not_ to think of Hugo. As painful as the memory of Hugo was, the vestige of the memory was far worse, a medieval chamber of torture whose accursed spikes clasped close ‘round her heart and pricked her, causing her to bleed just a bit more with the slightest of shifts.

Vera felt like an unfinished drawing, not one of those sketches by an Old Master who with three strokes of charcoal could render an entire character, history and temperament. No, Vera was like a child’s picture, the kind of scrawled mess that forced you to feign admiration and force enthusiasm when you didn’t have a clue as to what the blasted thing was.

Cyril had been beyond the scribbling stage.

_Cyril…_

Vera hardly ever thought of Cyril. But she thought of Hugo far too often.

Especially here.

It was sea, she supposed.

Vera’s gaze lighted on the framed parchment over the mantelpiece, and she shuddered.

Three deaths in two days and each one a sort of horrid pantomime of the first three lines of that poem.

In the poem Vera recognised a madness, not Vera’s own particular blend of madness, but a madness all the same. She understood rules that were one’s own, to be acted upon but not shared with others. She supposed someone like Miss Emily Brent had volumes of such rules, but those were just things parroted back from a father or a vicar or some such. Those rules were tedious as well as terrible.

But there were others, like, you did what you had to do for the man you loved. Or you meted out justice regardless of a jury’s decision. Or a mother’s forgiveness.

Three sentences of death had already been carried out.

Anthony Marsden, Mrs. Rodgers, General MacArthur.

No one would lose sleep over Marsden’s death and Mrs. Rogers, well, she wasn’t afraid anymore, was she? But General MacArthur…

Such a sweet man, really, but he’d been so odd the last time he’d talked to Vera, so resigned, so weary. She told him that she didn’t know what he meant about the relief of no longer having to carry the burden, but she been lying, or the other Vera had.

General MacArthur had been tired. Vera was tired.

Tired of acting, tired of that other Vera, the one who had to make her way in the world, the one that had to protest and explain and apologise, the one that had to wring cambric and make her voice tremble when she told her story.

That story, it was the only one Vera had now.

Yes, Vera was more like General Arthur than she cared to admit, but she didn’t want to be like him. She wanted to be like _him_ , that selfish, shameless cad with the wolfish grin, the one who had looked a room full of strangers straight in the eye and said, ‘Yes, I did it.’

What would that feel like, to say it aloud?

‘I killed a boy because I loved a man, and it didn’t work and what a chump I am!’

Would saying it make Vera less empty? Or, more likely, she thought, would the emptiness suddenly, savagely swallow her whole?

Vera was tired of empty. Bone-weary of it, really.

Tonight, she wanted to be filled. And she knew by whom.

She knew it the moment she’d laid eyes on him in the train. She’d been right in her appraisal of him: he _had_ been to some interesting parts of the world and seen some interesting things. She’d also been right in his appraisal of her. He’d liked what he saw in the train, had said to himself something to effect of that he’d like to try her on.

Well now was his chance.

They’d try each other on and see if they fit.

Because whatever this business was about, Vera’s eyes flitted back to the poem, it wasn’t a secretarial job. _That_ pretense no longer need be upheld.

Vera listened to the men retiring to their respective rooms and took advantage of the sounds of four bolts and four locks to unbolt and unlock her door.

She waited a bit, then cracked the door and stood there with a candle in hand.

Moth to flame, he came, crossing the length of the hall silently, in bare feet.

She let him in and closed the door behind him.

Their eyes met. Neither smiled.

She was dressed in a simple shift, having removed everything else in anticipation and expediency.

They danced, he advancing, she retreating, until her legs hit the bed.

Then his arms went ‘round her and eased her onto her back.

She closed her eyes as he kissed her neck and the swell of her breasts. Her hand smoothed along his shoulders and upper arms and back, feeling his strength through his shirt. He righted himself and quickly unbuttoned his shirt and trousers while she watched.

Hair.

Even in the candlelight she could tell his body was thick with it.

Not Hugo, then.

Hugo had been smooth almost everywhere. Like a boy. Like a sculpted god.

This creature looming over Vera was a different kind of god. The naughty kind, the god made beast kind.

Vera parted her legs a bit.

He bent over her and rucked up the hem of her shift, then moved closer, prick in hand, and began teasing the opening of her cunt with his prickhead.

Despite being on the cusp of achieving her aim, that is, of being filled, Vera was distracted, and by the time his prick was fully sheathed inside her, she had forgotten all about her emptiness.

A surprised little moan escaped her when their chests rubbed.

God, what a delicious feeling.

He stilled and dropped his head and chuckled.

“Like that, do you? Tut-tut, Miss Claythorne, too many boys, not enough men.”

He gripped the V neck of her shift in his fists and rent the garment down the middle.

Vera’s breasts hung free. He gave them a hard squeeze, then made certain he brushed against her nipples with every thrust.

Vera clung to him and clenched ‘round his prick; she wriggled and reveled in pleasure and, yes, the safety of him.

She was safe here, she knew, safe as houses.

Captain Philip Lombard was a murderer, but he wasn’t _this_ murderer.

His breath was ragged in her ear. “This and more, Miss Claythorne, this and more.”  

More.

Oh, so he was a fool, too? Promising ‘more’ when neither of them knew if they’d live past tomorrow.

Vera leaned back, arching away from him, and he caught her in his arms. Then she drew a hand up to the underside of her breast, cupped it in a gesture of offering.

He grinned that wolfish grin and lowered his head. He suckled one teat, then the other. She quite liked the wet heat of his mouth and the coarseness of his growing stubble on her sensitive skin. Their lower halves found a rhythm that Vera found so incredibly satisfying, yes, filling, she closed her eyes and made a wish that it wouldn’t end.

What kind of tormented soul was she? To ask to do _this_ for all eternity?

Could be worse. This was safe. Safe as houses.

His body tensed. He gave a soft snort and a sharp thrust, then his body stilled.

Vera’s eyes fluttered open and she noticed, for the first time, a big black hook hanging from in the middle of the ceiling.

The tip of the hook was curled and pointed. It gave the appearance of a fishing hook and, for some reason, that reminded her of Hugo.

Then suddenly there was a hand gently covering Vera’s eyes and a rough whisper in her ear.

“Don’t think of him.”

“Who?”

“The bastard you killed the kid for.”

Suddenly, Vera wanted to be empty.

He withdrew and kissed her cheek. “Be careful, Miss Claythorne. I think, well, I think we’re being hunted. I’ll come back tomorrow night, if you’d like. That and more, much more.”

She nodded.

“Please be careful,” he repeated as he set himself to rights.

She felt a pang of petty sorrow as he hid his chest.

“Lock, bolt, chair in front of the door, the lot,” he was saying. “This house, well, it isn’t safe, is it?”

Vera said nothing.

He sighed. “I know you’re a smart girl. When I saw you on the train I said to myself that you were the kind who could hold her own in love and war. Well, this is the latter, and I don’t want anything to happen to you, Miss Claythorne.”

Captain Philip Lombard did not want Miss Vera Claythorne to die.

Well, that was something.

Vera wondered if Mister Hugo Hamilton had an opinion on the same subject.

His lips brushed her cheek once more.

And then she listened to his panther-like tread as he left her.


	2. Chapter 2

The next night Vera was not an empty vessel for him to fill. On the contrary, he was hers to command.

After a few quick, frantic, panting open-mouthed kisses as he pressed her back to the wall, she had him on his knees.

With boyish eagerness, he burrowed beneath linen and wrestled with silk and lace for the privilege of pleasuring her, and when his lips finally found her sex, Vera leaned hard against the wall, sank a bit more into the calloused palms that cradled her buttocks, and let him feast.

This was no boy, this was a man who’d been to some interesting places and seen some interesting things and learned some interesting skills, like how to scale cliffs like a mountain goat and how to make a woman want to scream and swoon.

His lips spoke of long-standing practice in a courtesan art that Hugo Hamilton might yet not even know—or care—existed. And he knew the finer points: how to keep his coarse stubble away from her most sensitive of parts, how to allow his lips and tongue, oh, God, that tongue, to do the work.

That tongue tasted her, delved inside her, probed her, wriggled against her, teasing her playfully.

Vera closed her eyes and made a wish that she might live past tomorrow.

Then she rolled her hips up into his mouth, rubbed his head, which bulged beneath a linen skirt quite unfit for double occupancy, and stifled a moan.

The day had been a waking nightmare, but with every new death, every fresh horror, every deepening of her dread, the other Vera was wearing away, being cast off, like the shedding skin of the cold-blooded.

The day had been dangerous, very dangerous, but the night was safe.

Safe as houses.

_Four little Soldier boys going out to sea;_

_a red herring swallowed one and then there were three._

Vera was now more certain than ever that the murderer was following the rhyme. Red herring. Something would not be what it seemed. A ruse. And something to do with the ocean. A boat, perhaps.

But that kind of wickedness was not of the man who called himself Captain Philip Lombard, the man who was lapping between her legs like an overgrown puppy.

His was a raw, selfish kind of rotten as noticeable as that stench of cigarettes which never left him.

But he was not selfish now, no.

He was slowing his pleasuring now. He was opening her and covering her clit with his mouth, then making love to her, slowly, tenderly, gently, as if there was all time in the world for every act, every indulgence, every fantasy.

He understood a woman’s body that much was obvious from the way he coaxed her desire, making it build a little, then die a little, then build a little more.

Mightn’t he understand more…

He might be able to. Unlikely that he’d want to. Or try to.

To be understood was to be loved. Vera knew that now, but it was such a perilous thought, as seductive as the suckle at her clit and the lick at her cunt, but dangerous, nonetheless.

She dared not trust him completely. With her body, yes, with her pleasure, absolutely, but not with everything. How could she? Since Hugo, she no longer trusted herself.

The skirt was ridiculously confining. She squirmed. He ceased his suckling and ducked out. He sat on the floor, propped on his arms, and watched with a wet grin as she stripped her lower half bare.

“Wasn’t much of a gentleman last night, was I?” he murmured.

“Are you ever?” she posed.

He tilted his head. “Tonight, yes. What would you like, Miss Claythorne?”

She unbuttoned her blouse and straddled him, then slowly, and somewhat clumsily lowered herself. “First, could you see your way to calling me Vera?”

“Been dying to. Ugh, horrible choice of words, forgive me. Philip?”

She nodded. “This is what I would like, Philip,” she said as she began to rut against his bare chest, painting his chest with her damp mons.

“Oh, God,” he breathed, his grin widening. “If, Vera, well, just if, I’d want you like this, always.”

She rid herself of the remainder of her clothes, then she leaned in and offered him her nipple.

He sucked and licked and toyed with her, then drew back with a lascivious pop.

“That’s the stuff to give the troops,” he groaned. “Ride me, Vera.”

She did.

Her pleasure burst, and her fingernails sank even further into his tanned skin.

Tanned almost everywhere, she noticed.

She curled ‘round him and he sat up, taking her in his arms and nuzzling at her neck.

“God, you’re so soft.”

He massaged her hips and breasts and stomach.

In one way, she thought, they were mirrors. He was mostly hard, body, mind, spirit, manner, but there was a streak of softness in him, like right now.

And she was mostly soft, but there was a vein of iron ore in her that was rarely tapped, but when it was, the results were devastating.

She brushed a wayward curl back from his forehead and sank her hands into his thick, dark hair. She closed her fingers and tugged his head back.

His eyes shone with lust. “The things I’d let you do to me, Vera.”

A smile curled her lips almost involuntarily.

“You’d like that, eh?” he teased. “When this is all over, when it’s behind us.”

It seemed extraordinary that he trusted her, especially given that he supposed the truth about her.

But then again, maybe not.

She was a murderer, but not _this_ kind of murderer.

Not queer poems and rogue justice.

He was raising his hips so that his erection, swathed in thin pyjama trousers, slotted into the cleft of her buttocks, nudging her in a persistent pet-like clamour for attention.

She stood and half-dragged him to his feet by his hair.

He shed the rest of his clothes, swept her up into his arms in rather gallant fashion, and strode to the bed. Then he turned, and they fell together backwards.

She crawled atop him and pinned his wrists to the bed with her hands.

“God, yes, Vera.”

He didn’t move his arm when she released it, the better to position his throbbing prick just where she wanted it. She began to sink down, impaling herself upon him, pressing his wrists, rounding her back.

“Damn,” he groaned, stretching the word out to three round syllables.

She bounced; the friction made an obscene wet sound. Then she looked down at his chest.

He whimpered when she pulled off of him.

She bent down and licked his nipples and rubbed her cheek, then her whole face, against the matted hair.

Fur, she thought, not hair. He was a panther, a silent predator with strength borne of survival, of tooth and claw.

When she’d had her fill, she resumed her position. He thrust up. She crashed down. Their bodies slammed together until he jerked hard and she squeezed his prick with every ounce of desire in her.

Let his last be a good one, she thought, as he pressed his lips together and gave a loud snort and spent himself inside her.

She released his wrists, and her hands went to his chest, of course, petting, rubbing caressing.

He fondled her, well, every part of her, and she was very soon wanting again.

This time she straddled him facing away, but still high up on his body, still rutting sore clit and used cunt against his chest. She found her release once more, then bent forward to kiss his prick rather chastely.

He answered the gesture with a similar peck to her inner thigh.

She righted herself, and he opened his arm in invitation.

“This is a nasty business,” he said when she curled next to him. “The nastiest I’ve ever known. No matter what happens, I shan’t forget you. And if,” he kissed her forehead, “well, if, then know I wish we’d had more time.”

Life was funny. That day—only three days ago, was it—in the train she’d never have imagined such kittenish romance to come from the likes of him.

Hugo had been a romantic. Was Vera a romantic?

No, she decided, as he stroked her shoulder and peppered kisses along her eyebrow, as their sides touched and limbs intertwined, as the sticky discomfort of drying secretions set in, but whether Vera’s lack of romance was because of Hugo or much older than that, she didn’t know.

A few more kisses, and he was rising.

“I'd best get back to mine,” he said.

The other Vera returned suddenly, surfacing like a drowned corpse wrenched free of its sinking stone.

“Do be careful, Philip.”

She sounded like a character in a film.

“Don’t worry about me, my girl,” he whispered just before he reached the door.

Ah, she thought, that’s where he’s wrong.

Vera wasn't his girl.

She was Hugo’s.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are my last thoughts about poor Vera. Thank you for reading.

Vera sighed.

“Pity we can’t have a bathe…”

Time stopped.

The gulls, the breeze, and the tide were all suspended, mid-caw, mid-flight, mid-flow. Only the golden glow of the setting sun remained unaltered.

Vera slipped out of her body just as she might slip out of a party that had grown tiresome and tiptoed to another place, another stage; she eased silently from behind an invisible curtain and hit her mark, taking up her place anew.

He was still there, just as in the other place, standing before her on the glowing sand, taking a moment to scan the horizon and the shore behind her.

The words she’d just uttered were still ringing out amidst the usual seaside noises of birds and wind and water.

“Pity we can’t have a bathe…”

“Why not?” he asked lightly, and she knew it was a dream because his countenance was devoid of desperation and terror, and her heart was light.

He tore off his shirt, and for Vera, at least, that answered every question she had.

They raced to see which could peeled out of their accursed clothes first, then they discarded the rags, left them, left everything, upon the rocky slope.

They frolicked on the shore, laughing and teasing, splashing and chasing each other, making like the funny little birds that frantically skip along the water’s edge.

Then they swam, and Vera discovered that he was as strong a swimmer as she was.

Out to a flat rock, back to shore, again and again, side by side, and with every lap, Vera jettisoned a bit more of her past. The old memories, they slowed her down, and she didn’t need them, anymore, not here.

Why bury secrets deep in your chest when you could cast them away, like messages in a bottle?

She felt reborn in this Eden of an island cove.

Nude. Free. Sinless—but not for long.

When they returned to shore, she knelt between his legs and licked the length of his shaft. Then she suckled his prickhead.

He groaned her name aloud when she swallowed him and repeated the exclamation when he spent himself in her mouth.

When she spit his seed, mingled with the briny slough on the shore. She licked and sucked his bollocks, licked him from prick to rim, then probed his hole with the tip of her tongue.

He fell upon the sand and drew her to him.

She straddled him, and he brought her to orgasm once with his mouth, then a second time with his hands.

She caressed his chest, ceaselessly.

His prick was soon stiff again and she rode him, facing away from the wolfish grin, towards the sea.

He wriggled one little spit-slicked finger in her arse as she bounced, and she reveled in the heightened pleasure.

“More,” she pleaded, the sound not unlike a bird’s plaintive cry, and he gave her more.

After he found his release, she collapsed atop him and slept.

Vera woke to darkness and the cusp of climax; she woke to a hungry mouth feasting on her, cunt and clit. With a tilt of her head, her lips found his prickhead and suckled with equal frenzy, fondling his bullocks with one hand and teasing his own rim with the other.

His trembling set off her own, and they quivered together.

Passion without end, without limits…

But, no. Nothing was forever. Not even seaside daydreams.

* * *

“What’s that there?” he asked abruptly.

It wasn’t, in fact, seaweed, as he supposed. It was, as she posited, a bundle of clothes, but a bundle of clothes wrapped around the lifeless body of Doctor Armstrong.

And that changed everything.

* * *

“Give me that revolver.”

“Come on, hand it over.”

As Vera glared at his outstretched hand, her mind tried to reconcile the two sides of him.

Neither side was lover. That Captain Philip Lombard was dead. He’d drowned when Vera woke from the dream or perhaps a short time later when she realised that he alone could be the murderer of nine people and that he was alone was her last threat.

No, Vera could not reconcile the madman that had orchestrated this grandiose, intricate, macabre massacre and the banal bastard who was attempting to order her— _order her!_ —to hand over the revolver.

How could a criminal mastermind, a villain of extraordinary, if homicidal, prowess, be so pathetically ordinary?

Give me the gun, Vera.

It was like a film.

No persuasion. No manipulation. No appeal. No subtlety.

Just ‘give me the gun.’

Vera almost sighed.

Men always thought they could tell you what to do, and Vera found herself surprised, and no little chagrined, that modern-day Moriartys were no different.

How dull. How disappointing.

Vera could plainly see his brain working as he contemplated which way, which method, would get him what he wanted. She could see that he was asking himself if he should lull her into security or make a quick dash; he was as transparent as when they’d met at the train station and pretended to save her from a wasp to distract her from a question he didn’t want to answer.

Once again, Vera wondered how someone so transparent had been able to organise and carry out all this bloodshed.

Vera didn’t know, and in a moment, she didn’t care.

She saw that he had made his decision, so she made hers.

“Now, look here, my girl, you just listen—”

Vera pressed the trigger.

The leaping body poised mid-spring, then crashed to the ground and rolled.

Vera came forward wearily.

The shot had gone through the heart, but that wasn’t what made Vera gasp.

His expression, his face.

He looked like…

...Hugo.

He wore the same mask of shock and disbelief that Hugo'd worn after she let Cyril drown.

Vera thought she could hear Hugo’s voice, slightly slurred, confessing to a stranger.

_“You wouldn’t think she’d do that, would you?”_

Oh, Hugo.

Some might kill for pleasure or perversion.

Vera only killed for survival.

And love.


End file.
